Portals
by Smile-I'mTheEndOfAllThatYouSee
Summary: When we open a book, read a play, or read an epic poem, what worlds are we stepping into?


**An AP Literature project. We had to do some kind of project that incorporated everything we've read for AP (excluding non epic poems). So I chose to do a poem, comparing books to dimensions. See if you can name the books, plays, and epic poems whose titles are not mentioned. Disclaimer: I don't own any of the literature mentioned.**

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They say every mind is a world

And that is very true –

We are all gods and goddesses

Of our own personal worlds

However, every novel and every play

And every short story and every poem

Is a portal to a world unknown

Except to the very creator himself

And if we open that portal,

What worlds will we see?

A mystery world set in medieval times

An epic poem of great proportions

Tells the story of the great Geatish hero Beowulf

And the monsters and the dragon he slew

By his fists and by his sword's bloody tip

The hero's name gives title to the poem

Who is the creator of Beowulf and his foes?

Homer may have been the god of creation of his world

But his world is home to Zeus, the gray-eyed Athena,

Kalypso, Hermes, Poseidon, Eos, and Helios who rule Homer's children

Three years spent in perilous journey and seven years spent in violation,

Odysseus is finally freed from the sea nymph's enchantment by divine intervention

And so he sets sail for his home lit by his wife and son's love and loyalty

But tarnished by suitors' greed, lust, and impoliteness

If eyes are the windows to the soul,

Sophocles writes the journey between Oedipus's eyes

And his soul, stained by an unknown secret

And that journey is a pathway of events

Paved by the blood of his father on his hands

And his mother's vaginal lubrication on his penis

So, by his eyes, Oedipus cuts the journey short

Shakespeare's mind is divided into many dimensions

And in one dimension – a very dark one – goes by the title _Hamlet_

Enter a world where a ghost cannot taste the light of Heaven

Until his own flesh and blood avenges his death caused by blood related kin

By this task, Hamlet dives into his pool of insanity

And Ophelia finds reason to drown in it

Now open wounds and mental scars leave Denmark captive

If a character is an author's child

As Adam and Eve is to God,

Can adoption be legal

In the realms of minds?

John Gardner adopts Grendel from _Beowulf_

And writes a story to his name

Gardner gives his new son thoughts and feelings

Of existentialism versus nihilism

On the first day of creation, a literary competition was declared

And weeks later, Mary Shelley had a dream

In which later, she reeled it from her subconscious

And molded it onto paper and inside her personal world

And thus, _Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus _was born

From it, the monster's fire has lead to a great blessing

But Frankenstein's fire has lead to a great curse

A picture's worth a thousand words

But in Oscar Wilde's little world

Written in _The Portrait of Dorian Gray_

A picture is the reflection of your soul

In which a portrait bears the ugliness of Dorian's sin

While his fair features remain like a Greek statue

Retaining its godlike features despite the sands of time

A doll's house is a jailhouse

For the women and the girls

Their minds are molded by masculine hands

Which also cage their spirits and minds

And toss them out when they become impure

For their husbands' and fathers' sakes

As Henrik Ibsen writes in his play _A Doll's House_

In Kate Chopin's world, the female sex

Is not Venus's mirror or Yin's teardrop

But a bird waiting to soar above the plains of sexism

And when she does soar, she must remain strong

Or else, she will land with broken wings

Like Edna with her broken bird wings

Who falls into the ocean that gave her freedom

Absurdity sweeps logic away into the wind

But Franz Kafka likes to ground it between words and onto paper

In the world of _The Metamorphosis_ but he does not reveal

The tether that gives reason to Gregor's absurd situation

In which unsettling dreams act as a psychological cocoon,

Transforming a man into a giant vermin

Prompting the metamorphosis of his family

Joyce's world is a real city

Built out of real brick and stone

But the citizens are his own

Story by story, motifs and epiphanies

Sew endings and beginnings together

Into a literary quilt that blankets Joyce's head

And the name of this Irish quilt is _Dubliners_

Earnest Hemmingway says goodbye

To guns, to violence, to honor perceived in war

And from his soul, he shapes his world

With those beliefs as his foundation

And so _A Farewell to Arms _is born

In which love woven into the fragility of Catherine's hair

Cannot protect the two lovers from death

But it defies a world torn by two halves

Unlike Kafka, Joseph Heller

Does not ground absurdity

No, he lets it run wild and free

Through his mind and onto paper

Yo-Yo likes to sit naked in a tree

Because of a dying man with a secret in his gut

A cat didn't get Hungry Joe's tongue but his life instead

Toni Morrison rejects the Hollywood ghost

History and her imagination come together

To create a new kind of ghost named Beloved

Beloved is the ghost of Sethe's baby

But she is also the ghost of trauma, the ghost of slavery

The ghost of our dearly beloved –

A eulogy to the "six million and more"

The seams that make up the fabric of Camus's universe

With no heavens above or hells below, no stars who control fate

Care nothing for humankind which has no impact on the seams

So Camus's child Meursault finds life's meaning

In the finality of death and in the indifferent universe

That there is no meaning in life, no beginnings after endings

And that is alright

What frightful world has Orwell created!

_1984 _– A world of thought control by Big Brother

With an electronic eye that sees all and hears all

And hands that posses the mind and even the heart

"War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength."

A dire warning that these contradictions will become paradoxes

Sprung from Orwell's mind as ideas and onto paper as words

And so each book and each story

Is a world unto their own

Dreams and interests celestially woven

In each author's head to create a world

Now made real by ink on paper

From castles to dystopian societies

From great gods and mythical transformations

To everyday people in very real places

All of this can be seen

If you just open the portal


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